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FAIR USE NOTICE FAIR USE NOTICE: This page may contain copyrighted material the use of which has not been specifically authorized by the copyright owner. This website distributes this material without profit to those who have expressed a prior interest in receiving the included information for scientific, research and educational purposes. We believe this constitutes a fair use of any such copyrighted material as provided for in 17 U.S.C § 107.
For years, scientists believed brain shrinkage was inevitable and irreversible.
Cutting-edge research has shown that brain cells can regenerate.
An amino acid called taurine plays an important role in creating new brain cells.
Researchers found that taurine increased the growth of brain cells by activating “sleeping” stem cells. Taurine also increased the survival of new neurons, resulting in an increase in adult brain cell creation.1-3
Recent studies reveal that taurine has unique biochemical properties that promote new brain cell formation.4,5 Animal studies show that taurine triggers new brain cells to grow in the hippocampus, the area of the brain most concerned with memory.1,6 This can lead to dramatic improvements in cognition and recall.7,8 Low levels of taurine have been observed in patients with Parkinson’s disease.9,10
In addition to these impressive brain benefits, taurine also boosts cardiac function and reduces arterial stiffness as well as reducing the negative impacts of metabolic syndrome.11-16 In fact, taurine supplementation added to the drug metforminhas been shown to offer tremendous reductions in tissue damage.17
Taurine levels fall significantly with age, leaving the brain, heart, kidneys, and other tissues deprived of this vital healing compound—one capable of rescuing dying cells and restoring cellular communication.1,6,18
Experts are beginning to recognize that with age, many can experience a taurine deficiency that is a real and fundamental threat to health.
The great news is that taurine is a super low-cost supplement, meaning everyone can benefit from its potential to slow and reverse degenerative processes.
Taurine Grows New Brain Cells
For years, scientists believed that brain shrinkage (atrophy) was an unstoppable degenerative process. New research reveals this loss of brain matter is partially caused byreversible processes.19,20 This knowledge opens the door to a new paradigm—one that aims to restore brain structure and function—as opposed to simply treating the symptoms.
One of the chief requirements for growing fresh brain cells is a little known amino acid:taurine. Taurine has a surprising number of critical actions concerning how cells protect and renew themselves.
Because taurine levels decline with age, older adults are unable to maintain the level of new brain cell formation required to preserve their youthful responses to toxic and metabolic insults.1,21 This taurine deficiency may lie at the heart of some of our most dreaded brain disorders.22
Studies now show that restoring taurine content in brain cells can reverse these trends, and rejuvenate brain structure and function. Animal studies show that taurine triggers new brain cells to grow in the hippocampus, a brain region centrally involved in memory.1,23
A study published in the journal Stem Cell Research found that taurine supplementation in middle-aged mice increased the growth of new cells in regions of the brain associated with learning and memory. It accomplished this by activating“hibernating” stem cells that were then capable of maturing into several different kinds of cells.1
In fact, one study showed that when human neural precursor cells (the early-stage neurons and supporting cells in the brain), were cultured with taurine, it produced significantly more brain cells, demonstrating how taurine stimulates stem-like cells to differentiate into functioning brain cells.2
In animals, taurine deficiency impairs brain growth by delaying normal neuronal development.2 Lab studies show that taurine can reverse this problem. When taurine-deficient brain cells are grown in culture and then taurine is added, it results in a sharp increase in the development of new cells. This is attributed to multiple mechanisms of action, including improved mitochondrial function; activation of genes required for normal proliferation, survival, and energy functioning;2 and blocking chemical signals that inhibit neuronal cell regeneration.3
In addition to promoting the growth of new brain cells, taurine enhances neurites, which are tiny projections that help brain cells to communicate with each other. Neurites maximize connections between those cells, along which electrical impulses flow to support memory, cognition, feeling, and thinking. Over time, chemical stresses and toxins can damage these neurites, contributing to slower cognition in older people.24 A lab study revealed that taurine restores normal neurite growth in nerves exposed to toxic chemicals, largely through its protective effects against chemical stresses.25
The findings that taurine can genuinely rejuvenate damaged brains are truly revolutionary, and are beginning to change the way scientists and neurologists are thinking about age- and trauma-related brain changes.26,27
Taurine’s Benefits For Brain Conditions
Two specific conditions taurine has been shown to help benefit are Parkinson’s disease and depression.22,28
Human studies show that taurine plasma levels are reduced in patients with Parkinson’s disease, suggesting both a potential contribution to the disease—and a possible treatment.28 This problem is compounded by the fact that standard treatment of Parkinson’s symptoms involves the drug levodopa, which may further deplete taurine.28 This makes it particularly important for Parkinson’s patients to supplement with this versatile amino acid.
Supplementing with taurine is also important for those suffering from depression.22 Depression is particularly prevalent in diabetics; indeed, there’s a strong school of thought that chronic blood sugar elevations are involved in depression and neurodegenerative disorders such as Alzheimer’s disease.29-31 Intriguingly, taurine supplementation in diabetic rats has been shown to improve depressive-like behaviors; in addition, supplementation improved the diabetes-damaged neurotransmitter function, which helped lead to improved short-term memory.32
WHAT YOU NEED TO KNOW
Taurine Promotes Brain Cell Regeneration
Taurine is a free amino acid that is vital in slowing key age-accelerating processes, particularly in the central nervous and cardiovascular systems.
Laboratory studies show that taurine can achieve what was once thought to be impossible—stimulate new growth and connections of brain cells, which raises the real possibility for restoration of youthful brain function in older adults.
Taurine levels decrease with age and with metabolic and neurological disease.
Supplementation with taurine, in both animal and human studies, demonstrates the age-decelerating effects of this amino acid.
Laboratory studies reveal dramatic improvements in cognition and memory in taurine-supplemented animals, and suggest that human supplementation might slow or reverse changes seen in Parkinson’s disease.
Taurine supplementation boosts cardiac function and reduces arterial stiffness, both contributors to early death from heart disease and stroke.
Those with metabolic syndrome also stand to gain from taurine supplements, which substantially reduce that syndrome’s negative impacts on cardiovascular risk.
Solving Your Heart’s Energy Crisis
Heart disease remains the leading cause of death in US adults.33
A recent study in mice has, for the first time, suggested that taurine might prolong life span by improving heart muscle function.34 The study used mice genetically engineered to be profoundly taurine deficient, a state that causes premature aging and severe heart problems, eventually resulting in early death.34 Painstaking work in other animal models revealed why taurine deficiency leads to these severe effects. Taurine deficiency disrupts the “electron transport chain,” which reduces the amount of energy-rich adenosine triphosphate (ATP) available for heart cells to support their contractions, leading to decreased pumping ability of the heart.
That fundamental finding—that low taurine levels contribute to or exacerbate poor heart muscle function—is now being corroborated by lab and animal studies demonstrating improvements in heart or blood vessel performance.
Poor or unregulated control of arterial smooth muscle is a major contributor to high blood pressure and resulting cardiovascular disease.35 Fortunately, taurine is known to have blood pressure-reducing and heart muscle-protecting effects.11 In a lab study, human artery segments were immersed in a chemical bath that induced contractions similar to those that occur during an angina episode or heart attack. The addition of taurine to the bath resulted in relaxation of the artery.
Animal and lab studies also show that taurine supplementation can mitigate ischemia-reperfusion injury,36,37 a major cause of long-term heart failure and further dysfunction. This type of injury occurs when there is a loss of blood flow to the heart muscle (ischemia) followed by the restoration of blood flow (reperfusion).38,39 Both processes can lead to an energy crisis and high amounts of reactive chemicals.
Ischemia-reperfusion injury is severely exacerbated by high sugar intake and diabetes because of negative effects on nervous system signals.40,41 Taurine supplementation can abolish those aberrant signals and improve arterial blood pressure following such an injury.42
HOW TAURINE ENHANCES BRAIN FUNCTION
Taurine has the unique ability to help promote new brain cell formation—but its benefits don’t end there. Taurine has several other important properties that preserve and enhance brain function:
Taurine restores to aging brain cells the ability to prevent and clean up after chemical stresses from reactive molecules, to fight brain inflammation, and to generate brain cell relaxing and stimulating signals at appropriate times.1,6,73-76
Taurine increases the electrical activity (signaling ability) in nerve cells through effects on calcium, a key element required for proper electrical function of neurons.77
Taurine can favorably mimic the actions of certain neurotransmitters, the chemical signals that brain cells use to communicate. From a chemical structural standpoint, taurine closely resembles the neurotransmitter gamma-amino-butyric acid (GABA).78,79 GABA is involved in learning, and studies in lower animals demonstrate improvements on simple learning tasks following GABA supplementation.79
Taurine supplementation supports learning in higher animals as well. Supplementation in a mouse model of inheritable intellectual disability (fragile X syndrome), which is associated with reduced GABA signaling, stabilized and recovered some cognitive functions to an extent that brought some measures of the animals’ performance close to that of normal mice.78
Human Studies Of Taurine’s Cardiovascular Effects
Human studies are demonstrating the impact of taurine’s cardiovascular effects.Large epidemiological studies show that deficiencies in taurine are associated with an increase in cardiovascular risk factors. For example, when compared to people with the highest taurine levels, those with the lowest levels had a 184% increase in the risk of obesity, a 22% increase in the risk of hypertension, and a 120% increase in the risk of elevated cholesterol.12
While the risk of taurine deficiency is great, encouraging studies show that supplementation with taurine can reduce risk factors for heart disease. And in fact, intervention studies are now showing that supplementation can rectify heart muscle energy deficiency to the point of improving clinical outcomes.43
One of the best examples of this is a Russian study on patients undergoing heart valve replacement and coronary bypass surgery—both of which are huge thieves of cardiac muscle energy. This study showed that supplementation with taurine resulted in improved heart pumping action, reduced the size of the enlarged pumping chambers, lowered triglyceride levels, and significantly improved quality of life.44 These benefits may help to reduce the rates of sudden death after cardiac surgery, which remain unacceptably high.45-48 As is typical with many mainstream doctors, if something costs virtually nothing, as taurine does, they overlook its critical lifesaving properties.
Congestive Heart Failure
Taurine has been shown to have protective effects against congestive heart failure, a common, energy-related complication in heart attack survivors, cardiac surgery patients, and people with hypertension or severe lung disease; it results from an inability of the heart to pump sufficient blood to meet the demands of the body.49
In a study published in the journal Clinical Cardiology, patients with congestive heart failure took either a placebo or 2,000 mg of taurine three times a day.50 Compared to placebo recipients, supplemented patients experienced significant improvements in the severity of their heart failure, and significant increases in measurements of the heart’s ability to pump blood. In addition, none of the taurine-supplemented patients worsened during treatment, while 29% of placebo subjects did.
In a similarly designed study, heart failure patients who took 500 mg of taurine three times a day experienced increases in exercise time and distance, and increased ability to utilize cardiac energy, compared with placebo. This is a graphic example of how taurine can affect heart muscle energy production, making it more efficient and helping to energize tired heart muscle.51
Another study of heart failure patients showed that taurine supplementation (3 grams per day for six weeks) resulted in significant changes in echocardiogram results, which showed improvements in the pumping action of the left ventricle, the chamber that pumps blood out to the entire body.52
Clearly, ample blood taurine levels are required for proper heart functioning and this data was published by Life Extension®decades ago based on what cardiologists in Japan had discovered when treating congestive heart failure patients with 3 grams of taurine per day.53 Let’s now look at some ways that taurine can reduce the risks for developing cardiovascular disease in the first place.
Taurine Reduces Metabolic Syndrome
Metabolic syndrome is the combination of central obesity, high blood pressure, insulin resistance/borderline high blood sugar, elevated triglyceride levels, and low HDL cholesterol levels.54 It is strongly associated with short- and long-term risks of cardiovascular and kidney disease, diabetes, cancer, and death.55-58
Taurine supplements have been found to be extremely effective in reducing harmful effects of metabolic syndrome—while at the same time inducing changes that reduce the syndrome’s long-term impact on cardiovascular risk.
Studies of diabetic and/or obese mice and rats demonstrate that taurine leads to consistent improvements in multiple components of metabolic syndrome, including insulin secretion and sensitivity and glucose tolerance.13-15
One study also showed that taurine-deficient mice develop kidney changes identical to those in human diabetic nephropathy, the leading cause of end-stage kidney disease.59 This suggests that taurine supplementation in metabolic syndrome patients might lower renal disease risk.16,60
And, in a remarkable pair of studies, taurine was shown to amplify the beneficial effects of metformin, a naturally derived antidiabetic drug with multiple health-promoting effects in metabolic syndrome. In the first study, when rats were treated with both taurine and metformin, they were better protected against chemical and metabolic stresses than when either was used alone.61 For the second study, the combination of taurine supplementation and metformin was found to provide the same pattern of protection as insulin against diabetes-induced metabolic changes, including preservation of renal function.17
Human Studies Of Taurine And Metabolic Syndrome
Human studies demonstrated just how important taurine supplementation is for people with metabolic syndrome, which exacerbates the age-related decline in taurine levels. Compared with healthy people, obese people have as much as a 41% reduction in taurine levels compared with healthy controls,62 while diabetics have a 30% reduction in taurine levels.63
The good news is that supplementing with taurine significantly reduces many of the risk factors faced by those with metabolic syndrome. For example, at doses of 3 grams per day for eight weeks, a group of obese adults had significant 29% reductions in plasma markers of inflammation (hs-CRP) and 20% reduction in lipid peroxidation (thiobarbituric acid reducing substances.)62
And when diabetics supplemented with 1.5grams per day, not only were their taurine levels restored to normal, but their platelet aggregation was reduced to levels seen in healthy controls.63 (Platelet aggregation is elevated in diabetics,64increasing the risk for stroke- or heart attack-inducing blood clots.)65 This study also involved a laboratory test of platelet aggregation, which showed that while taurine reduced aggregation in blood from diabetic patients, it had no effect at all on blood from healthy controls. (This is a safety concern about virtually all prescription antiplatelet drugs).
In addition to the heart disease and stroke risk induced by aggressive platelet aggregation, diabetics (and even nondiabetic people with chronically “high normal” blood sugar levels) are at increased cardiovascular risk from physical stiffening of their arteries.66-68
Again, taurine supplementation is able to reverse this dangerous state of affairs. In a study published in Diabetes & Vascular Disease Research, young adults with type I diabetes and impaired endothelial function supplemented with 500 mg of taurine three times a day. After just two weeks, their abnormal arterial stiffening and reactivity returned to levels found in controls!69
Since type I diabetes (formerly known as “juvenile-onset,” or “insulin-dependent” diabetes) exposes its victims to much greater elevation and fluctuation in glucose levels even than those seen in type II (“adult-onset”) diabetes, seeing this dramatic effect in the more severe form of the disease is especially encouraging for the much larger population of type II diabetics.49,70,71
Summary
Taurine, a little-known amino acid,72 can do the seemingly impossible: stimulate new brain cells to grow in adult brains. This capability creates an entirely new paradigm for the ways we think about age-related cognitive decline, and even major neurodegenerative diseases like Parkinson’s and Alzheimer’s.
Taurine levels fall as we age, leaving our brains relatively unprotected. Taurine levels are low in people with age-related brain disorders. Animal studies reveal that supplementation can not only restore youthful taurine levels, but also improves deficits in memory and cognition.
Taurine also has a fundamental connection with longevity, particularly related to cardiovascular disorders. Animal studies demonstrate protection against heart disease with taurine supplementation, and human studies show that supplementation produces dramatic improvements in heart and blood vessel function.
People with metabolic syndrome have lower taurine levels than their healthy peers; again, taurine supplementation drives down the detrimental effects of metabolic syndrome while inducing changes that reduce the syndrome’s long-term impact on cardiovascular risk.
A balanced supplement program should aim at restoring youthful levels of nutrients known to counteract the chemical stresses, inflammatory changes, and toxic exposures we experience through life. The evidence for the amino acid taurinesuggests that it be included in such a regimen.
If you have any questions on the scientific content of this article, please call a Life Extension® Health Advisor at1-866-864-3027.
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Processed foods are suspected of causing a variety of heath issues.
Foods high in sugar and refined carbohydrates, for example, are known to
cause high blood sugar and obesity. But recent research has uncovered
an entirely new mechanism by which many metabolic disorders can be
triggered. Certain additives that are commonly used in processed foods
are being shown to impact health, at least in mice, by altering the
body’s population of bacteria that live in the gut. Collectively
referred to the microbiome, the importance of this bacterial community
of millions is just beginning to be understood.
Research published last September demonstrated that artificial sweeteners can raise blood sugar levels
in mice, stimulate their appetites, and possibly lead to obesity and
diabetes. The artificial sweeteners appear to create these conditions by
changing the micriobiome’s composition.
Last month, a different set of researchwas
published that also suggested a disease pathway mediated by microbiome
disturbance. This time, commonly used food additives called emulsifiers
are the culprits.
Emulsifiers
help keep sauces smooth and ice cream creamy, they hold dressings
together and prevent mayonnaise from separating into oil and water. The
new research gives reason to suspect that emulsifiers could raise your
blood sugar, make you fat and even make your butt hurt.
The study,
published in Nature, looked at two common emulsifiers, Polysorbate 80
and carboxymethylcellulose (CMC), and found a range of metabolic
problems that appeared in mice who were given water dosed with these
chemicals in quantities proportional to what a human might consume. The
mice who drank either emulsifier tended to eat more, gain weight and
develop conditions like irritable bowel syndrome, colitis and metabolic
syndrome, which is a range of pre-diabetic conditions.
The effects
of these additives were dependent on the dosage; the more emulsifier
the mice consumed, the worse off they were. A control group drank water
laced with a common preservative, sodium sulfite, and did not show any
negative effects on the gut.
The team found that the bacterial
diversity of the mice microbiomes were altered. They also discovered the
mucous membrane of the gut was thinner in mice who were fed
emulsifiers. The thinner mucous membrane allowed the microbes closer to
the gut wall than they would normally get, they wrote, which could cause
the observed inflammation of the gut wall, and diseases like irritable
bowel syndrome.
John Coupland, a professor of food science at Penn
State University, thinks this research could be a game changer,
providing it can be shown that these emulsifiers can do to humans what
they do to mice. “[It] really challenges a lot of the way we think about
assessing toxicology and nutritional value of foods,” he said in an
email.
Coupland noted that Polysorbate 80 and CMC are very
different molecules. While Polysorbate 80 is small, and doesn’t carry an
electrical charge, CMC is large, and charged. These molecules are not
only built differently, but they behave differently, he said, pointing
out that CMC is technically not even an emulsifier, but a thickener that
makes emulsions more stable. That they both cause similar microbial
disruptions, mucous reductions and associated health problems is a
striking discovery.
In an email interview, the study’s
co-author, Benoit Chassaing, acknowledged that CMC is more of a
thickener than an emulsifier, but noted that it does have emulsification
properties, due to its charge. He suspects the resulting emulsifying
activity is to blame.
I asked how they originally thought to look at emulsifiers. Chassaing explained:
"The
incidence of IBD and metabolic syndrome has been markedly increasing
since about the mid-20th century, and this dramatic increase has
occurred amidst constant human genetics, suggesting a pivotal role for
an environmental factor. We considered that any modern additions to the
food supply might play an important role, and addition of emulsifiers to
food seems to fit the time frame of increased incidence in these
diseases.
"We hypothesized that emulsifiers
might impact the gut microbiota to promote these inflammatory diseases
and designed experiments in mice to test this possibility."
The
team is currently investigating other common emulsifiers, aiming to
identify any others that might cause microbial disturbances, or
inflammation of the gut. Carrageenan, Chassaing noted, has already been foundto
cause inflammatory bowel disease in rats. Extracted from seaweed,
carrageenan is widely used in processed “natural” foods. Like CMC,
carrageenan is more of a thickener than an emulsifier, but is, like CMC,
on the spectrum of additives that exhibit emulsifying properties.
One
molecule his team is currently investigating is lecithin, which is a
true emulsifier. Like carrageenan, lecithin is used in many “natural”
processed products. If lecithin shows similar activity to carrageenan,
CMC, and Polysorbate 80, it would cast a shadow over many, many
processed food formulations. Organic processed foods are still processed
foods. Organic approved additives like carrageenan can still give you
ulcerative colitis.
Food
additives are tested for certain toxilogical activities, like the
ability to cause cancer, or to cause a mouse to instantly drop dead. But
they aren’t tested for any potential effects they might have on one’s
microbiome, or their ability to stimulate one’s appetite, or cause
conditions like irritable bowel syndrome.
If the recent results on
mice can be repeated in humans, current testing protocols for food
additives will be revealed as woefully inadequate.
If you stay
away from highly refined, heavily processed foods with long lists of
ingredients, you can avoid most of these additives in one swoop, and not
have to worry about inadequate testing procedures.
But not
everyone has the luxury of being able to avoid processed foods,
especially the poor, and ironically, people stuck in institutions like
hospitals. That’s why we need the standards by which food additives are
evaluated to be updated sooner, rather than later.
Ari LeVaux writes a syndicated weekly food column, Flash in the Pan.
Organic dates, peanuts, organic raw honey, brown cricket... so reads an ingredient list for Chapul's Chaco Bars.
Chapul
is just one of a growing number of food businesses selling edible
insects for human consumption. Chapul grinds its cricket protein into
flour, allowing consumers to reap the health benefits of the cricket
meat without the satisfying crunch of biting into an entire grasshopper
taco, as can be found at New York's Tacombi.
This
is nothing new. Humans have been eating insects since prehistoric
times, continuing through ancient Greek and Roman tradition and
persisting as a traditional food for many cultures in Asia, Africa and
Latin America, according to National Geographic.
Aren't
crustaceans just giant underwater bugs? Would people be so eager to eat
lobsters if they crawled around suburban backyards?
Think biting into a cricket is far off for you? Check out the FDA's sanitation and transportation standards,
which states the limits for insect fragments, larvae and even rodent
hair in processed food. One rodent hair in under 100 grams of chocolate?
Totally fine. Four-hundred-seventy-five insect fragments in less than
50 grams of ground pepper? No biggie. When it comes to preprocessed
foods, standards are lax, at best, for what can go into these huge
batches of edible mass.
While many may gag at the thought of
eating a bug, Americans pump their body full of many more unsightly
chemicals and compounds on the regular. Before snubbing a hugely
sustainable (and to many, tasty) source of protein, you should think
twice about your yoga mat sandwich bread. Antifreeze, human hair, coal
tar, rodent hair and feces, silicone, arensic and beaver anal glands are
just some ingredients you'll find in commercially produced food. All of
these ingredients are disguised as unrecognizable chemical names that
sound, well, edible.
Amino acid, for example, sounds like a
perfectly natural ingredient. And it is, for the most part. But this
shelf life prolonger found in most packaged breads is derived from
feathers, animal hair and even human hair, claimed to be swept off
barber shop floors in China, according to VRG.org. Mother Jones also points out that L-cysteine,
another name for the amino acid, can come from animal sources but can
also be created in a lab, and added to items like packs of hamburger
buns for fast food chains to prevent spoilage. Is a chemical allowing
you to eat month-old bread really much better than consuming crickets?
A
scandal about the popular cinnamon whiskey Fireball using antifreeze as
an ingredient broke out in fall 2014, leaving plenty of shot-taking
tailgaters perplexed about what they were actually getting drunk on.
Fireball doesn't use actual antifreeze in its boozy concoction, but
propylene gycol, a component in antifreeze, is used in the American
version of the drink. U.S. law doesn't require that alcohol
manufacturers print ingredients or nutrition info on the label (like
packaged food), but when Norway, Sweden and Finland received shipments
of the whisky containing the chemical, they refused to sell this
formula. The FDA says propylene glycol is “generally recognized as safe”
to consume, so it can't be much worse than crickets, right?
Castoreum,
the dried and macerated castor sac scent glands (and their secretions)
from male or female beavers, is also recognized as generally safe by the
FDA. The ingredient is used as flavoring and fragrance in foods like
ice cream, but why is anyone messing around with beavers' behinds when
they can just make good, totally natural ice cream?
Natural
flavoring, an ingredient found on food labels from ice cream to crackers
to frozen vegetables, is yet another suspicious and potentially
disgusting commonplace ingredient. Everything from crushed beetle shells
to who knows what can be labeled as natural if it follows fairly
arbitrary FDA standards. So yes, crickets may be part of the natural
flavoring of your favorite candy bar and you may never know.
When
it comes to eating, being informed is better than staying in the dark. A
small-batch, chocolate-dipped cricket may not be much worse than a
commercially manufactured chocolate bar.
More protein than
beef. More omegas than salmon. Tons of calcium, antioxidants, and
vitamin B. In their secret R&D lab, the scientists at Beyond Meat
concocted a plant-protein-based performance burger that delivers the
juicy flavor and texture of the real thing with none of the dietary and environmental downsides.
I did them
all. And that was that. By then I knew that with every burger I
consumed, I was helping to suck America’s rivers dry, munching on a
fecal casserole seasoned liberally with E. coli, passively condoning an
orgy of torture that would make Hannibal Lecter blanch, and accelerating
global warming as surely as if I’d plowed my Hummer into a solar
installation. We all needed to kick the meat habit, starting with me.
Yet
previous attempts had collapsed in the face of time-sucking whole-food
preparation and cardboard-scented tofu products. All the veggie burgers I
knew of seemed to come in two flavors of unappealing: the brown-rice,
high-carb, nap-inducing mush bomb, and the colon-wrecking gluten chew
puck. Soylent? In
your pasty dreams. If I couldn’t have meat, I needed something damn
close. A high-performance, low-commitment protein recharge, good with
Budweiser.
I
took long, moody walks on the dirt roads near my Vermont house. I
passed my neighbor’s farm. One of his beef cattle stepped up to the
fence and gazed at me. My eyes traced his well-marbled flanks and meaty
chest. I stared into those bottomless brown eyes. “I can’t quit you,” I
whispered to him.
But
I did. Not because my willpower suddenly rose beyond its default
Lebowski setting, but because a box arrived at my door and made it easy.
Inside
were four quarter-pound brown patties. I tossed one on the grill. It
hit with a satisfying sizzle. Gobbets of lovely fat began to bubble out.
A beefy smell filled the air. I browned a bun. Popped a pilsner.
Mustard, ketchup, pickle, onions. I threw it all together with some
chips on the side and took a bite. I chewed. I thought. I chewed some
more. And then I began to get excited about the future.
It was called the Beast Burger, and it came from a Southern California company called Beyond Meat,
located a few blocks from the ocean. At that point, the Beast was still
a secret, known only by its code name: the Manhattan Beach Project. I’d
had to beg Ethan Brown, the company’s 43-year-old CEO, to send me a
sample.
And
it was vegan. “More protein than beef,” Brown told me when I rang him
up after tasting it. “More omegas than salmon. More calcium than milk.
More antioxidants than blueberries. Plus muscle-recovery aids. It’s the
ultimate performance burger.”
“How do you make it so meat-like?” I asked.
“It is meat,” he replied enigmatically. “Come on out. We’ll show you our steer.”
Beyond
Meat HQ was a brick warehouse located a stone’s throw from Chevron’s
massive El Segundo refinery, which hiccuped gray fumes into the clear
California sky. “Old economy, new economy,” Brown said as we stepped
inside. Two-dozen wholesome millennials tapped away at laptops on
temporary tables in the open space, which looked remarkably like a set
that had been thrown together that morning for a movie about startups.
Bikes and surfboards leaned in the corners. In the test kitchen, the
Beyond Meat chef, Dave Anderson—former celebrity chef to the stars and cofounder of vegan-mayo company Hampton Creek—was frying experimental burgers made of beans, quinoa, and cryptic green things.
The
“steer” was the only one with its own space. It glinted, steely and
unfeeling, in the corner of the lab. It was a twin-screw extruder, the
food-industry workhorse that churns out all the pastas and PowerBars of
the world. Beyond Meat’s main extruders, as well as its 60 other
employees, labor quietly in Missouri, producing the company’s current
generation of meat substitutes, but this was the R&D steer. To make a
Beast Burger, powdered pea protein, water, sunflower oil, and various
nutrients and natural flavors go into a mixer at one end, are cooked and
pressurized, get extruded out the back, and are then shaped into
patties ready to be reheated on consumers’ grills.
The steer, as Beyond Meat's prototype extruder is known, turns plants into beasts.
Photo: Misha Gravenor
“It’s
about the dimensions of a large steer, right?” Brown said to me as we
admired it. “And it does the same thing.” By which he meant that plant
stuff goes in one end, gets pulled apart, and is then reassembled into
fibrous bundles of protein. A steer does this to build muscle. The
extruder in the Beyond Meat lab does it to make meat. Not meat-like
substances, Brown will tell you. Meat. Meat from plants. Because what is
meat but a tasty, toothy hunk of protein? Do we really need animals to
assemble it for us, or have we reached a stage of enlightenment where we
can build machines to do the dirty work for us?
Livestock,
in fact, are horribly inefficient at making meat. Only about 3 percent
of the plant matter that goes into a steer winds up as muscle. The rest
gets burned for energy, ejected as methane, blown off as excess heat,
shot out the back of the beast, or repurposed into non-meat-like things
such as blood, bone, and brains. The process buries river systems in
manure and requires an absurd amount of land. Roughly three-fifths of
all farmland is used to grow beef, although it accounts for just 5
percent of our protein. But we love meat, and with the developing world
lining up at the table and sharpening their steak knives, global protein
consumption is expected to double by 2050.
That’s
what keeps Brown up at night. A six-foot-five, pillar-armed monument to
the power of plant protein, with a voice that makes James Earl Jones
sound effeminate, he became a vegetarian as a teenager growing up in
Washington, D.C., after his family bought a Maryland dairy farm. “I
began feeling very uncomfortable in my leather basketball shoes,” he
says. “Because I knew the cows. I’d pet them all the time.”
In
his twenties he became a vegan. “It wasn’t emotional. It was a question
of fairness,” he says. “ ‘Why are we treating our dog so well and not
the pig?’ As you get older, you try to become more coherent.” He was
already thinking big. “I wanted to start a plant-based McDonald’s.”
Instead, he went into the alternative-energy business, working on fuel
cells for Vancouver-based Ballard Power Systems. “Somehow energy seemed
like a more serious thing to do. But the food idea kept eating at me,
until finally I said, ‘You know what, I gotta do this.’ ”
Brown’s
aha moment came in 2009, when the Worldwatch Institute published
“Livestock and Climate Change,” which carefully assessed the full
contribution to greenhouse-gas emissions (GHGs) of the world’s cattle,
buffalo, sheep, goats, camels, horses, pigs, and poultry. An earlier
report by the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization had
pegged that contribution at 18 percent, worse than cars and trucks.
That’s shocking enough, but the Worldwatch study’s authors, two analysts
from the World Bank, found that the FAO hadn’t taken into account the
CO2 breathed out by our 22 billion livestock animals, the forests being
felled to make room for pasture and feed crops, or the total impact of
the 103 million tons of methane belched into the air by ruminants each
year. When everything was tallied up, Worldwatch estimated, livestock
were on the hook for 51 percent of GHGs.
That
was all Brown needed to hear to put the plant-based McDonald’s back at
the top of his agenda. Forget fuel cells. Forget Priuses. If he could
topple Meatworld, he thought, he could stop climate change cold.
Brown’s first breakthrough came when he discovered Fu-Hung Hsieh,
a food scientist at the University of Missouri who had perfected a way
to turn soy protein into strips that chewed like chicken. (Top secret,
can’t tell you, but it has to do with heat, kneading, and cool water.)
Brown founded Beyond Meat in 2009, and in 2012, its inaugural product,
Beyond Chicken Strips, began wowing the gatekeepers of the food world.
“Most impressive,” said Food Network geek Alton Brown. “It’s more like meat than anything I’ve ever seen that wasn’t meat.”
So did Bill Gates, whose Gates Foundation backs potentially world-saving innovations. “I tasted Beyond Meat’s chicken alternative,” he wrote online,
“and honestly couldn’t tell it from real chicken.” Gates quickly
realized the blockbuster potential. “Our approach to food hasn’t changed
much over the last 100 years. It’s ripe for reinvention. We’re just at
the beginning of enormous innovation.”
Gates sat
down with Brown in 2012 and gave him some tips, which the entrepreneur
took to heart. As Brown recalls, “He said to me, ‘If you get this thing
to cost less than meat, and you get international quickly enough, then
this is huge.’ ”
The
scalability is there: Beyond Meat’s manufacturing process uses a small
fraction of the land, water, energy, crops, and time that making real
meat does, and it requires no new technology. And the timing is right.
Whole Foods has enthusiastically sold Beyond Chicken Strips, which
retail for $5.29 for a nine-ounce bag, from the very beginning. And
although Brown wouldn’t disclose sales numbers (“Our competitors
definitely make use of this type of information,” he says), Beyond Meat
expanded from 1,500 to 6,000 stores in 2014, including mainstreamers
like Safeway.
Even
the fast-food industry is coming around. When Chipotle added
shredded-tofu Sofritas to its burrito options at a few California
restaurants in 2013, sales outstripped expectations. Half the Sofritas
buyers, Chipotle found, were meat eaters. Chipotle is now rolling them
out across the country, the first new item it has added in ten years.
One rapidly growing restaurant chain, Veggie Grill, an all-vegan West
Coast eatery, offers seemingly familiar fast-food items like Mondo
Nachos and Crispy Chickin’ with meat replacements made from soy and
gluten.
But
you can’t fix climate change with fake chicken. Although the 21 billion
cluckers around the world consume vast amounts of crops and choke
waterways with their manure, their impact is dwarfed by the 1.5 billion
head of cattle. It takes about 9,000 calories of edible feed to produce
1,000 calories of edible chicken and 11,000 calories of feed for 1,000
calories of pork—a far cry from the 36,000 calories required for 1,000
calories of beef. More important, cattle and their ruminant
cousins—sheep, goats, buffalo—produce geysers of methane during
digestion. One molecule of methane traps 25 times as much heat as a
molecule of CO2, so each cow produces the annual GHGs of a car driven
about 9,375 miles. Per pound, that’s eight times more than chickens and
five times more than pigs.
There
are, of course, lots of good arguments for raising cattle sustainably:
it’s easier on both the animals and the land. But it’s no solution when
it comes to global warming. Grass-fed beef generates significantly more
methane and has nearly twice the carbon footprint of its grain-fed kin.
If Brown was going to tackle climate change, he had to hack beef.
Beef
flavor has never been all that difficult to approximate—some salt, some
aroma molecules, and bingo. The juiciness and the chew are the real
challenges. The meat industry acknowledged as much in a 2006 trade
publication: “Meat texture is supremely important. Texturized vegetable
protein, something that could be quite a commercial threat to us … has,
so far, made little impact,” wrote the meat scientist Howard Swatland,
author of Meat Cuts and Muscle Foods.
“This is because food technologists so far have been unable to extrude
their plant proteins into anything resembling real meat. The taste and
colour can be faked quite easily, but the texture cannot. In a way,
therefore, it is the texture of meat, and the fact that many of our
customers love to eat it, that keeps us all in business.”
Photo: Misha Gravenor
Muscle
is made up of bundles of long, thin fibers wrapped in tough connective
tissue, like shrink-wrapped logs. Scattered through the fiber packets
are tiny pockets of fat, which the body draws on for energy. A lot of
the joy of meat is the feeling of your teeth punching through these
bundles, the fat and juice squirting as you chomp.
Plant
proteins, on the other hand, are not aligned or bundled. They’re more
like random piles of sticks. They have none of the tensile strength or
moisture-retention properties of muscle, which is why earlier
generations of veggie burgers fell apart and lacked the release of rich,
juicy fats. The only exception is gluten, the protein found in wheat,
which has some amazing qualities. It forms a spring-like structure that
can expand and contract, making dough stretchy and retaining moisture in
its matrix of interlinked proteins. But those long proteins also like
to curl in on themselves like a nest of snakes, which prevents digestive
enzymes from getting at them. When that partially digested gluten makes
it into the gut of someone with celiac disease, the immune system
mistakes the intact proteins for evil microbes, freaks out, and strafes
the intestine with friendly fire. Even those who don’t have an adverse
response to wheat often find the concentrated gluten in veggie burgers
to be digestively challenging.
For
Brown, gluten was out. Also becoming less popular with consumers was
phytoestrogen-heavy soy, the other mainstay of both veggie burgers and
Beyond Chicken. But top food scientists had labored for years to come up
with palatable soy- and gluten-free meat substitutes, with no luck.
Plants just didn’t want to be meat.
It
was time for a paradigm shift. In the fall of 2013, Brown hired Tim
Geistlinger, a biotech rock star who had been working with the Gates
Foundation to develop antimalarial drugs and a yeast that makes clean
jet fuel out of sugar. Geistlinger fits the Beyond Meat mold: brainiac
science geek who bikes on the beach every night and recently completed
his first Tough Mudder. (“I was one of the only non-meat-eaters on my
team,” Geistlinger says, “but with access to compounds like these, it’s a
no-brainer.”)
Geistlinger,
chef Dave Anderson, and the other Beyond Meat scientists began a series
of marathon sessions in the lab, trying to do what cattle do: transform
short plant proteins into long, succulent fibers. Their legume of
choice was the yellow pea, whose protein is readily available—both to
the body and in the marketplace. Pea starch is used by the food industry
as a natural thickener for everything from sauces to deli meats. In the
past, after the starch was isolated, the protein was discarded.
Win-win.
Pea
protein is the new darling of the no-soy health-food set, but it has a
powdery mouthfeel and no structural integrity, so it has never starred
in its own production. “Without fibers you can have something that’s
hard and dry or mushy and wet,” Geistlinger says. “They’re fairly
mutually exclusive.” Early last year, Beyond Meat released a pea-based
product, Beyond Beef Crumble, that approximated the look and feel of
cooked ground beef and made a decent taco filling, but it wouldn’t hold
together and had no chew. Geistlinger decided he had to create fibers
from the material—that is, do something to make them line up and link
together to mimic muscle.
For
a while the team got nowhere. Geistlinger kept tweaking the
chemistry—“taking shots on goal in a constructive way,” as he puts
it—and Anderson kept playing around with the results. Nothing. “Early on
we thought we were close,” Anderson remembers. “So I brought in an
In-N-Out burger. We tried the In-N-Out and it was just chew, chew, chew,
and then we tried ours. I was like, ‘Wow, we’re not even close.’ ”
Photo: Beyond Meat
Eventually,
Geistlinger suggested trying something radical—the big Beast Burger
secret, which involves a certain combination of temperature, pressure,
timing, and chemistry that he could tell me about only in veiled terms.
“The food scientists had been arguing to go in one direction, because
that’s how things had always been done,” he recalls. “And I said, ‘Well,
this is a different protein. I think we should push this in the
opposite direction.’ They were like, ‘Why would you do that? You can’t
do that.’ And I said, ‘Well, let’s just give it a shot.’ And sure
enough, boom. It was immediately apparent. We tasted it right when it
came out, and we just went, ‘Wow! We’ve never had that before.’ It was
awesome. You could see the fibers. You could feel them. And it didn’t
get dry in your mouth! All these problems that we’d had just went away.
Later that day, we met with our CFO and I said, ‘Here, try this,’ and he
said, ‘Holy shit! What is that?’ And I said, ‘That’s the same stuff. We
just changed two things.’ It turned out much, much better than we ever
thought it was going to be.”
To perfect the nutritional formulation, they worked with Brendan Brazier,
a two-time Canadian ultramarathon champion who created the Vega line of
vegan performance foods. After playing around with the burger, Brazier
became a convert. He liked the taste, but he loved the 24 grams of
protein, 4 grams of fiber, and 0 milligrams of cholesterol in every
burger, which left beef (19 grams of protein, 0 grams of fiber, and 80
milligrams of cholesterol) far behind.
“It’s so nutrient dense,” Brazier told me. “I plan on using several per week.”
The
Beast Burger will have its coming-out party in select Whole Foods in
January. Is it as delicious as a quarter-pound of well-marbled,
inch-thick USDA Choice? Hell no. Good ground beef, lovingly grilled at
home and served piping hot, packs a juicy succulence that this Beast
lacks. In flavor and texture, the current Beast reminds me of the
Salisbury steak of my youth—not exactly something to celebrate, but not
terrible, either. “It’s a different kind of chew,” Anderson admits. “To
me it’s a better chew. A beef burger is very gristly.”
The
prototype Beast was so packed with micronutrients that it smelled like a
Vitamin Shoppe kiosk. Taste testers made it clear that they’d gladly
sacrifice a soupçon of supplement for a blast of beefiness. The new
iteration is good enough that New York Mets captain David Wright, who
stopped eating red meat years ago after noticing that it made him feel
sluggish, will endorse it—part of Beyond Meat’s aim to woo red-blooded
athletes—and it’s only going to get better.
“Why
just look at soy and pea protein?” Brown says. “Why not look at every
plant and see what has the best amino acid profiles and what can be
produced the most cost-effectively? It turns out there are a lot of
things you can get protein from.”
“What’s
exciting to me is that we now have a completely different set of
proteins that we can tune,” says Geistlinger. “We’re looking at yeasts
and algae, which both have amino acid profiles that are superior to
beef. We made something that used yeast from the brewery across the
street. It came out like bratwurst!”
The
issue of Frankenfoods raises its head. When I told Geistlinger that I
was skeptical of processed foods, especially ones produced by novel
techniques, he pointed out that Beyond Meat uses no artificial
ingredients and employs the most time-tested of cooking methods (heat
and pressure). “Our process is gentler than making pretzels,” he said.
“Getting that browning on a pretzel requires chemically changing the
bonds in the molecules. That’s more harsh than what we do.”
Grilling
meat also involves chemical changes, of course, but ones that have been
tested for many generations. Mark Bittman, for one, is going to stay
off the faux-meat bandwagon for now. “I think we have to evaluate each
of these products individually,” he told me. “Some fake meats can easily
pass for ‘real’ meat, but in many cases that’s because ‘real’ meat has
been so degraded by the industrial production of animals. Still: the
best direction for most of us is to eat unprocessed food of all types;
fake meat hardly qualifies.”
Health
aside, some of my friends were just weirded out. Why turn plant
proteins into burgers and dogs? Why not just eat them as peas and
soybeans and seeds? To which I say: taco, chimichanga, empanada, crepe,
pierogi, wonton, gyoza, stuffed roti, pupusa, pastie, pig in a blanket,
croque monsieur, pastrami on rye. Culture is a lump of flesh wrapped in
dough. If you want to save the world, you’d better make it convenient.
You’re
still wondering about that shit-burger, aren’t you? Here’s what I know.
Every year, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention teams up
with the FDA to check for antibiotic-resistant bacteria in the meat sold
in American retail outlets. In 2010, the most recent year for which
data has been released, they purchased 5,280 samples across 11 states
and tested four states’ for fecal bacteria. They found it in 90 percent of ground beef and ground turkey, 88 percent of pork chops, and 95 percent of chicken breasts.
If
this shocks you, then clearly you haven’t been watching YouTube videos
of slaughterhouses in action, where the high-speed slicing and dicing of
300 to 400 head of cattle an hour saturates the air with a fine fecal
mist. Really, the amazing thing is that 10 percent of our ground
beef—even the organic stuff, which is largely processed in the same
manner—manages to escape contamination, and that anyone eats it at all.
The part that really terrifies Meatworld? Millennials are already bailing on beef.
Every
generation skews toward vegetarianism in high school and college, only
to regress as life gets more complicated. But the newest graduates
aren’t coming back. “We’ve definitely seen interest in vegetarian as
well as vegan food rising steadily on college and corporate campuses,
but so has interest in eating less meat in general,” says Maisie
Ganzler, VP of strategy for Bon Appétit Management Company, which
provides food services to many top universities and corporations,
including Duke, Johns Hopkins, Yahoo, and Google. If you want to know
what America’s next generation of thinkers is eating, just ask Bon
Appétit. “For us, vegan isn’t about niche appeal,” Ganzler says. “We try
to offer a lot of vegan options in the cafés for our high-tech clients.
Millennials are more meat conscious, and vegan appeals to a variety of
growing populations.”
As
vegetarianism goes mainstream, factory meat’s one advantage—that it’s
cheap—disappears. “There aren’t any obstacles to us underpricing beef as
we scale up,” Brown says. “The industry is large and established, yet
it’s facing huge cost challenges. The price slope for beef since 2010
has been pretty steep. We’re already competitive with certain grades.”
There’s
no reason that Beyond Meat can’t have extruders all over the world
churning out affordable protein patties and even a plant-based “raw”
ground beef that’s red, pliable, and designed for cooking. Once that
happens, Brown won’t let U.S. supermarkets slot him into the hippie
aisle anymore. “As soon as we have our ground beef ready, they need to
put it next to the animal protein.”
He’ll have to catch Impossible Foods,
founded by Stanford University biochemist Patrick Brown and also backed
by Bill Gates, which in October revealed a raw “ground beef” featuring
bioengineered “plant blood” designed to approximate hemoglobin. The
patty turns brown and savory as it cooks. Although the costs are not yet
competitive and the flavor is a work in progress, Impossible Foods
expects to have its meat going head-to-head with ground beef next year.
“Livestock is an outdated technology,” says Patrick Brown.
Considering
the speed of change, the money and smarts being thrown at the problem,
and the desperate need, it seems likely that sometime in the next
decade, Beyond Meat or Impossible Foods or another rival will perfect
vegetarian beef, chicken, and pork that is tastier, healthier, and
cheaper than the fast-food versions of the real thing. It will be a
textbook case of disruptive technology: overnight, meat will become the
coal of 2025—dirty, uncompetitive, outcast. Our grandchildren will look
back on our practice of using caged animals to assemble proteins with
the same incredulousness that we apply to our ancestors’ habit of
slaughtering whales to light their homes.
I
was thinking about that on the kind of crackling fall day when
absolutely anything feels possible, back at my neighbor’s farm, eyeing
my four-legged friend. The leaves on the Vermont hills were a shimmering
metallic curtain of bronze and rust, the sky limitless, the pasture
speckled with goldenrod. A week of daily Beast Burgers had left me
wildly energized and clearheaded, and I liked the feeling. “I don’t know
what I ever saw in you,” I told him. He blinked back at me and uncorked
a fragrant burp.
Contributing editor Rowan Jacobsen (@rowanjacobsen) wrote about the Colorado River in July 2014.
Two years ago in the New York Times Magazine, the great food writer Mark Bittman made the case for fake meat.
"Isn’t it preferable," he asked, "to eat plant products mixed with
water that have been put through a thingamajiggy that spews out meatlike
stuff, instead of eating those same plant products put into a chicken
that does its biomechanical thing for the six weeks of its miserable
existence, only to have its throat cut in the service of yielding barely
distinguishable meat?"
The argument is powerful. Factory-farmed meat doesn't taste like
much, yet generates all manner of wreckage, from antibiotic-resistant
pathogens to fouled water and air to horrific working conditions and
what amounts to systematized animal torture. Indeed, why not just eat
some soybeans tarted up to look and taste like meat instead?
Well, the falafel revolution I tried to foment has not materialized.
At the time I scoffed
at Bittman's alternative. I deplored the ingredients list of the
chicken substitute he had profiled—soy protein isolate, pea protein,
carrot fiber, etc.—as an example of what Michael Pollan has called
"nutritionism": fracturing perfectly excellent whole foods like peas and
carrots into components and reassembling them into something less
nutritionally valuable. "You're almost certainly better off eating
carrots and edamame—young soybeans that actually can be eaten by
people—than you are ingesting mashed-up isolated components of them," I
sniffed, and then went on to suggest that everyone interested in eating
less meat turn to tried-and-true, minimally processed high-protein
vegetarian foodstuffs instead.
Well, the falafel revolution I tried to foment has not materialized. And now, another piece by an esteemed food writer—Rowan Jacobson, author of American Terroir: Savoring the Flavors of Our Woods, Waters, and Fields—has caused me to rethink my position.
In a much-shared article in Outside, Jacobson profiles a company called Beyond Meat, which plans to debut a product called Beast Burger
later this month. Where other companies, including Beyond Meat, have
made substances that closely enough resemble chicken, Jacobson reports,
the Beast Burger will represent the first respectable facsimile of beef.
It wasn't some flavor or texture breakthrough that prompted my
reconsideration. Despite the lofty promise in the article's subtitle
("the juicy flavor and texture of the real thing"), what Jacobson
actually tastes when he bites into a Beast Burger doesn't exactly pique
the appetite—unless you have a thing for '70s-era school-cafeteria
cuisine:
Is it as delicious as a quarter-pound of well-marbled, inch-thick
USDA Choice? Hell no. Good ground beef, lovingly grilled at home and
served piping hot, packs a juicy succulence that this Beast lacks. In
flavor and texture, the current Beast reminds me of the Salisbury steak
of my youth—not exactly something to celebrate, but not terrible,
either.
In an excellent 2013 piece on Beyond Meat and other faux-animal-product purveyors, Mother Jones' Sydney Brownstone
had a similar reaction to the company's chicken strips: "Without any
sauce or fixings, the strips' flavor resembled that of a grilled
Chick-fil-A breast abandoned in a cup holder for a few days."
Nor do I find the people behind these companies particularly
appealing. Both Jacobson and Brownstone portray the shakers and movers
driving the new-wave meat alternatives as Silicon Valley-funded,
jargon-spouting techsters—the kind I look to for a clever smartphone
app, not for lunch.
So why am I abandoning my opposition to fake meat? Jacobson drives
home a point that's been made before, but it's starting to convince me:
Why turn plant proteins into burgers and dogs? Why not just eat them
as peas and soybeans and seeds? To which I say: taco, chimichanga,
empanada, crepe, pierogi, wonton, gyoza, stuffed roti, pupusa, pastie,
pig in a blanket, croque monsieur, pastrami on rye. Culture is a lump of
flesh wrapped in dough. If you want to save the world, you'd better
make it convenient.
Companies like Beyond Meat will never be able to introduce pea
protein powder into one end of a machine and extrude a convincing
substitute for seared steak or roasted chicken from the other. But maybe
they can replicate the way most people actually experience meat: As
part of some heavily seasoned, hyperprocessed concoction. Brownstone's
devastating description of her experience eating that fake chicken
product involved bare strips. But tweaked with "Southwest-style"
seasonings, she reports, "they really did taste startlingly similar to
what I remember from my pre-vegetarian days."
Most people don't want to eat just beans.
While I still maintain that you'd be better off just eating beans
than hyperprocessed beans made to simulate meat, I can acknowledge that
most people don't want to eat just beans—and that these
products are likely nutritionally superior to the factory-farmed meat
they aim to replace. And Jacobson supplies evidence that such products
are already luring meat eaters away from meat at fast-food joints. "When
Chipotle added shredded-tofu Sofritas to its burrito options at a few
California restaurants in 2013, sales outstripped expectations," he
reports. "Half the Sofritas buyers, Chipotle found, were meat eaters."
All of which brings me back to that 2012 Bittman piece—the one I
dismissed at the time. Why, he asked, turn to Tyson and other gigantic
meat companies to "use the poor chicken as a machine to produce meat
when you can use a machine to produce 'meat' that seems like
chicken"—and much more efficiently? According to Jacobson, it takes
36,000 calories worth of corn and soybeans to produce 1,000 calories of
feedlot beef. It's obviously preferable just shove that feed into a
processor, tweak it a bit, and produce something beeflike. Especially
if, as Jacobson, Brownstone, and Bittman all seem to think, people will
eventually embrace such substitutes (even if I won't—I still like to
process my own beans).
If these Silicon Valley tech bros can "disrupt" Big Meat into
oblivion, I now say, "bon appétit." I could live happily enough in world
in which factory-farmed meat is replaced by factory-tweaked bean
products, while pastured-based animal farming (a vital element of truly sustainable and productive farming) still flourishes alongside it.
Barely a week goes by without a celebrity “opening up” about their
“battle with depression”. This, apparently, is a brave thing to do
because, despite all efforts to get rid of the stigma around depression,
it is still seen as some kind of mental and emotional weakness.
But
what if was nothing of the sort? What if it was a physical illness that
just happens to make people feel pretty lousy? Would that make it less
of a big deal to admit to? Could it even put a final nail in the coffin
of the idea that depression is all in the mind?
According to a
growing number of scientists, this is exactly how we should be thinking
about the condition. George Slavich, a clinical psychologist at the
University of California in Los Angeles, has spent years studying
depression, and has come to the conclusion that it has as much to do
with the body as the mind. “I don’t even talk about it as a psychiatric
condition any more,” he says. “It does involve psychology, but it also
involves equal parts of biology and physical health.”
The
basis of this new view is blindingly obvious once it is pointed out:
everyone feels miserable when they are ill. That feeling of being too
tired, bored and fed up to move off the sofa and get on with life is
known among psychologists as sickness behaviour. It happens for a good
reason, helping us avoid doing more damage or spreading an infection any
further.
It also looks a lot like depression. So if people with
depression show classic sickness behaviour and sick people feel a lot
like people with depression – might there be a common cause that
accounts for both?
The answer to that seems to be yes, and the
best candidate so far is inflammation – a part of the immune system that
acts as a burglar alarm to close wounds and call other parts of the
immune system into action. A family of proteins called cytokines sets
off inflammation in the body, and switches the brain into sickness mode.
There
are other clues, too: people with inflammatory diseases such as
rheumatoid arthritis tend to suffer more than average with depression;
cancer patients given a drug called interferon alpha, which boosts their
inflammatory response to help fight the cancer, often become depressed
as a side-effect.
Others
aren’t willing to go that far, not least because infection is not the
only way to set off inflammation. A diet rich in trans fats and sugar
has been shown to promote inflammation, while a healthy one full of
fruit, veg and oily fish helps keep it at bay. Obesity is another risk
factor, probably because body fat, particularly around the belly, stores
large quantities of cytokines.
Add this to the fact that stress,
particularly the kind that follows social rejection or loneliness, also
causes inflammation, and it starts to look as if depression is a kind of
allergy to modern life – which might explain its spiralling prevalence
all over the world as we increasingly eat, sloth and isolate ourselves
into a state of chronic inflammation.
If that’s the case,
prevention is probably the place to start. It’s not a great idea to turn
off inflammation entirely, because we need it to fend off infections,
says Slavich, but “lowering levels of systemic inflammation to
manageable levels is a good goal to have”.
The good news is that the few clinical trials done so far
have found that adding anti-inflammatory medicines to antidepressants
not only improves symptoms, it also increases the proportion of people
who respond to treatment, although more trials will be needed to confirm
this. There is also some evidence that omega 3 and curcumin, an extract of the spice turmeric,
might have similar effects. Both are available over the counter and
might be worth a try, although as an add-on to any prescribed treatment –
there’s definitely not enough evidence to use them as a replacement.
In
between five to 10 years, says Carmine Pariante, a psychiatrist at
Kings College London, there may be a blood test that can measure
inflammation in people with depression so that they can be treated
accordingly. Researchers have already come up with a simple finger-prick
test that reliably measures inflammation markers in a single drop of
blood.
And as for the stigma – could it really be killed off by
shifting the blame from the mind to the body? Time will tell. This is
not the first time that depression has been linked to a physical
phenomenon, after all. A recent survey found that despite wider awareness of the theory
that “chemical imbalances” in the brain cause depression, this has done
nothing to reduce stigma; in fact, it seemed to make matters worse.
This
time, though, the target is not any kind of brain or mind-based
weakness but a basic feature of everyone’s body that could strike anyone
down given the right – or wrong – turn of events. And if that doesn’t
inspire a greater sympathy and understanding, then nothing will.
